AT JUST 20 years old, Irvine’s Sian Hughes is already making a name for herself as one of the area’s brightest young voices.

The former St Matthew’s Academy pupil currently undertakes a variety of roles in her mission to represent young people in North Ayrshire, and on March 21 took home the title of Young Citizen of the Year at the Civic Pride Awards.

On collecting her award from the Provost, Sian said she was “flabbergasted”, and that was the same word she used to describe her feelings when she spoke to the Times this week.

“It is still true,” she said. “I really didn’t think I was going to win as I know I had some strong competition. It is really humbling to know that people recognise how hard I work and how proud I am to be a young person and a citizen of North Ayrshire. I obviously don’t do anything I do to win awards but it is an absolute honour and I am really happy I did win.” Sian, who is studying social work at Glasgow Caledobnian University, juggles uni life with her commitments to the executive committee of North Ayrshire Youth Council, Epilepsy Initiative Scotland on the Scottish Youth Parliament, the Girl Guides and the Open Ayrshire (LGBT) Group.

Explaining how she came to take on so much, she said: “I don’t like to think I chose the groups I work with, I think they chose me! I suppose it started with the youth council which I got into through pupil council at school and it was just something I was interested in and that led to exec and now I won’t leave.” Through the executive came the opportunity to represent North Ayrshire on LGBT Youth Scotland’s National Youth Council, where she met the people with whom she would go on to form Open Ayrshire.

“I would have to say since joining the youth council my proudest moment was the first birthday of Open Ayrshire,” she said. “If it wasn’t for the youth council I would never have been able to have the opportunity to collaborate with other amazing young people and get the group started. We have now been up and running for just over a year and I couldn’t be more proud.

“As for my Girl Guides, that sort of just happened. I was asked by a senior guider to help start the unit and due to unforeseen circumstances she had to leave and my mum and I ran the group ourselves. This was difficult to begin with as neither me or my mum had experience or running a guide group but we got the hang of it.” Because of her own diagnosis with epilepsy, she was also a natural choice to represent the Scottish Epilepsy Initiative at the Scottish Youth Parliament.

She commented: “I suppose its easy to see by now that I don’t mind talking to people so becoming an MSYP was another platform where I could represent young people living with epilepsy in Scotland.

Quizzed about other subjects affecting young people today that she feels deserve more attention, Sian said: “Primarily I think my main concern is youth unemployment. I know that the cabinet of NAC are doing a lot of work to revive North Ayrshire and attract business, especially in my home town of Irvine, however I think we still have a long way to go and I personally would like to see a revival of industry in North Ayrshire.” Another subject she feels deserves more attention - and which she has spoken about at the Scottish Youth Parliament - is mental health. “I feel that this is an important issue to work on,” she said, “Because currently one in four of us will experience mental ill health in our lives and I feel this is too high a number not to have a more structured strategy to tackle misconceptions and stigma. “Young people are much more susceptible to things like self-harm and eating disorders, often caused by stress, often caused by exams, workload, time constraints, lack of income. These are real issues happening to real young people all over Scotland and I want to do something to make a change.”